I Do, Make, Read, Watch, Eat…

For the past well, long time, I have been working on a project for my mom. My mom loves to take pictures and save the prints, but since I was 5 the prints have just been in boxes. The only album of our pictures goes until I was 5, everything else is in boxes. So one day I had this bright idea and volunteered to take all those pictures, organize them, and put them in albums.What was I thinking?! Little did I know how much of a massive undertaking this would be. I wish I had taken a picture of the pile of boxes at the beginning of this project. There were 5 or 6 boxes full of walmart prints, school pictures, Christmas cards, every kind of picture you can imagine! And in no order!

I also did not realize how much of a workout this would be on my brain and my memories. Thinking, “okay…what year did I have that haircut…” And “Adam, help me count how many candles are on this cake so I know which birthday it is.” Sheesh. Not only did I have to deal with all of the printed pictures, but the 20+ photo CD’s full of pictures, and then all the pictures from the computer that didn’t get printed and didn’t get put on a picture CD.

Why did I sign up for this?
All that to be said, that I am almost done. This week, almost 400 photos are going to be delivered by Walmart.com to my apartment, yes that is how many from the CDs and computer needed to be printed, and then, once those are organized and put into the album I will be finished!

And on that day I will be so thankful to be finished. And mother, if you’re reading this, please never let it get that bad again. I’ll teach you to use Shutterfly. You can just upload your photos, they will even auto put them in the pages, you just have to order it and then it comes to your house. So easy! Because I would really like to never volunteer for this again 🙂

I will admit it has been a little fun to look through all the photos and family memories, but it would be nicer to do that without all the extra work and brain crunching. So be thinking of me in the next couple days as I scramble to finish these scrapbooks and get them out of my apartment!

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For those of you who read my angry post earlier, you know that this is take number two on this blog. And I am sad because I know that it will not be anywhere near as good as the first one. The first blog post, who knows where it is now, was a pure masterpiece. It was wonderful. Hopefully you still enjoy this, but you don’t know what you’re missing. Anyways, here goes:
I love scrapbooking!! The only problem is that I am always caught up! As soon as I take some pictures, within the week I have printed them and scrapbooked them, and then I don’t have any more scrapbooking to do until something else happens. One day I hope to have a great big room filled with scrapbooking supplies. I have been scrapbooking since my first scrapbook in 2001. Here is a page from that first scrapbook.

Yeah, not exactly a work of art, but it was enjoyable even when it didn’t look good. The problem was, that I was so excited to have a scrapbook that I filled it up in one day. So it is full of stuff that doesn’t need to be there, and everything looks bad because I didn’t wait to have the proper supplies. I didn’t want to wait until my mom could take me to get some, I had to get it done then and there. And you can tell by looking at it. In the last 12 years I have worked much harder on my scrapbooks. I have organized my photos, planned my layouts and designs. Over the years I have managed to fill up 8 scrapbooks full of photos. I love to get them out and look at all the pictures. Scrapbooking is like decorating a room in your house. You get to pick what color you want the walls, what pictures you want to put up, and what other decorations will fill the room. And then you get to do it over and over and over again!!

I find that scrapbooking is very relaxing. Over the years I have even researched how to make my pages better, and that has been really fun. There is so much creativity that can go into scrapbooks. I don’t like to just buy an album and slide my pictures into the sleeves. Somehow it’s better to look at an actual scrapbook that I have made and see how I told the story of the pictures. I really enjoy it.

The rest of this blog post will be me sharing some of my favorite scrapbook pages. I hope you enjoy this little look into my scrapbooks.

This first page is from a scrapbook that I made of Adam and I growing up. It is one of my favorites to pull out and look at. It is fun to look at our cute pictures as little kids (and to envision what our children will look like–haha)
Awwwwwwww. So cute, right?

These next pages are from my first serious scrapbook, where I took the time to plan out what I wanted my pages to look like. These first pages I really like #1 because of the pictures and #2 because I thought I was brilliant by going out and getting real leaves to put in my layout.
This next page is a couple pictures that my sister and I took when she came to visit me at college. I chose the color palette simply. I only had two colors of paper left, and lucky for me they looked good together. I like this page because of the depth I created by layering the pieces. I think it helps to make it more interesting even though the stars and moon don’t exactly fit the pictures. I am not sure what I was thinking with that.

This next page is really special to me. When Adam and I were dating, one year before Christmas I went up to Wisconsin for a week to spend time with him and his family. One of the days I was there we took a train into Chicago to do some shopping and see the sights. Then, later Adam came down for New Years. On New Years Eve we scrapbooked the pictures from our trip. Adam came up with the design for this page. It was fun to do some scrapbooking together.
These next few pages come from my “best” scrapbook. This scrapbook has some of my best design and layouts. At this time, I was subscribed to a scrapbooking magazine and I got a lot of inspiration from it. If these pictures are too small for you to see, I think you can click on them and see them bigger.
Okay, so this is my favorite page ever! I saw this layout in my scrapbooking magazine, and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to do it! The layout was called “10 Things I Love About You.” Since I was dead set on making this layout and I didn’t have any pictures that would work, I made Adam go out with me and take pictures on Spring day specifically for this scrapbook layout. And you probably can’t tell, but there are tabs on each side. On the backs of those Adam and I each wrote 10 things we love about the other person and I cut the page so they can be pulled out and read.

When we got married, we decided not to buy a professional album of our pictures because I knew I would enjoy a scrapbook that I made of our pictures much more, and so far I have no regrets. Here are just a couple pages from that scrapbook:
Yay Scrapbooking! I hope you enjoyed that look into my scrapbooks. I certainly enjoyed making the pages and getting to show you my favorites and tell you about them. And I am glad it finally worked. Hopefully if you have never scrapbooked before you are at least interested now. And if any of you love scrapbooking as much as I do, I am always looking for a scrapbooking buddy!